Artist Madeline Sherry
My roots are in Abstract Expressionism being influenced first as a young child visiting the Guggenheim and The Modern in New York seeing so many Kandinskys and by my first painting teacher Eugene Massin . I worked on large canvasses using a thick application of oil paint.
My focus when painting is always on the form and setting color variations against one another to create something exciting to the eye. This is true of both my figurative and abstract work.
Working now on paintings with an emphasis on the 1940’s and the climate of the time.The end of World War II and the influence of the new media on society. I call this new work “The Promise of Tomorrow”. This new body of work was inspired by the force of advertising . In 1975, a friend gave me some Life Magazines from the year of my birth and I planned to someday use these images in my work. I needed time to figure out the connection. All the ads were like magical places where we all wanted to live with the things the advertisements told us we should buy and even more what moral codes we must live by. It was all very subtle and yet so effective. In 2011 I began painting images of” my own propaganda” from 1940’s and 1950’s magazine ads. I have tried to add to the original mass media propaganda images in some cases by including a bit of the now in drastic contrast.
Influences on my painting style have been the expressionists, the impressionists and some of the Flemish/Dutch School, especially Breugel and Vermeer. However,I could not have lived in this century and not have been influenced by the contributions of Pablo Picasso.
Born in New York City 1944
B.S. 1966 University of Miami;
Post Grad work in Fine Art: Parsons School of Design, The New School, UCSD.
USC Under Painter Francoise Gilot (Gilot was the long time companion of Pablo Picasso and mother of their two children Paloma and Claude. She later married world renowned scientist Jonas Salk) & San Diego State University.)